Electronic machinery manuracturers have been promoting recycling by collecting their used products to recover reusable ones. There are two ways to collect used products; one is that users directly send used products to a collection facility and the other is that users send them to business offices of local distributors which temporarily store the used products and send various kinds of used products to a collection facility together. Then, the collection facility determines reusability of collected products and delivers non-reusable products to a recycling facility to destroy them while delivering reusable products to a reproduction facility. These collected products, however, may include defective products lacking some components which have been removed by users before disposal for their own purposes. This may cause a problem that the reproduction facility needs to spend a lot of time and resource to find reproducible products from the collected products.
Meanwhile, in order for manuracturers to continuously promote the environmental conservation, cost efficiency is an important factor. In view of achieving satisfiable cost performance, there is a need for a device or a method which can cost-efficiently check missing components in collected products. For example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2004-69811 (Reference 1) discloses a device which allows a collector to easily find that a collected machine is a recycled product from the exterior thereof. Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2004-347899 (Reference 2) discloses an electronic substrate mounting structure of an electrophotographic imaging device which achieves a reduced number of screws by concurrently releasing fastening of an occasionally detached component such as an exterior cover and an electric wave shield cover. Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2006-211484 (Reference 3) discloses system and method of checking a missing component and an assembly error by an inspection program which is boosted according to a manipulation to a keycap in a production process for assembling in the same production line a complex machine which comprises a plurality of functions of copying, facsimile, printing and the like, a controller executing the functions, a panel with keycaps to be manipulated by users for execution of the respective functions.
However, the device in Reference 1 is intended for determining whether a collected machine is a reproduced machine and determining an outer condition of the machine but not for determining if there is a missing part inside the machine. Also, the substrate mounting structure in Reference 2 has features in the reduced number of screws but it cannot check if there is a missing part inside a collected machine. Further, the system in Reference 3 can check a missing component and an assembly error by boosting an inspection program according to a manipulation to a keycap but has a problem in terms of cost efficiency and checkup sustainability since buildup of the system requires a great amount of money and a checkup of a missing part is not feasible without turning on the machine. Moreover, turning on the machine without knowing its internal condition may cause a problem such as short-circuit.